News

Selling My Old Laptop

Feb 082012

Selling My Old Laptop

What to do with an old, no longer used, laptop is a big question for a lot of people.

Well fret no more, DZyne.net will take your old laptop from you for parts and you may even get some money for your old machine, depending on what we can recover from it.

As we do a lot of laptop repairs here we can always use some extra memory, spare hard-drives, second-hand screens and even keyboards or DVD drives on occasion. For this reason we often take in machines that are old, don’t work anymore or just have non-working parts. If they’re new enough and we can use enough of the parts we’ll pay for the unit.

What are the Advantages of Giving my Laptop to DZyne.net?

A very good question. Firstly we’ll ensure that your hard drive is wiped, meaning that nobody else is going to get their hands on your data, for whatever reason. You’d be surprised how much information you may have on your old drive that you’d rather others didn’t access. If you want the data transferred to a USB key, DVD or other drive we can also facilitate this.

Recycling. Something everybody is on board with these days. We will recycle as much of the machine as we can, preventing it from ending up in an electronics dump somewhere.

Simplicity. If you’re in the regions of South Tipperary, North Cork, East Limerick or West Waterford then we’ll pick up the machine from you – saving you a lot of hassle having to decommission it and dump it.

Will you Take Desktop PC’s

Occasionally. There isn’t nearly as much demand for PC’s now as there once was, the market is moving very quickly toward laptop and tablet devices. If a machine is not too old we will consider it as we may be able to fix it up for donation to a local school – they are always on the lookout for equipment.

What do I do next?

Just give us a call on 086 83 89 877 or email info@DZyne.net and we’ll take it from there.

Should I Invest in Facebook - We Say No

Feb 022012

Should I Invest in Facebook – We Say No

If you’ve any interest in technology, and particularly if this interest is married to even a passing interest in the stock market (or just ‘shares’ as we like to call them in Ireland) then you’ll no doubt have encountered the runaway train that is the Facebook Initial Public Offering (IPO) of shares. Even though it is not due to happen until May 2012, you can expect the hype between here and then to be absolutely relentless as the company and its Wall Street backers get all its ducks in line for a successful Out of Box Experience (what Microsoft refers to as OOBE).

The obvious question for anyone interested both in technology and in the stock market is “Should I invest in Facebook Shares?” – we think the answer to this question is an emphatic “No“. Here’s our reasoning.

Firstly, the US tech market, where the Facebook IPO is to be launched, is in a huge bubble at the moment. Values have spiralled and are now showing a huge similarity to the market before it collapsed at the start of the century (2000). At that time the Dotcom revolution turned into a Dotbomb, as investors twigged that a lot of the companies in which they were investing could never actually make any of the money that was being factored into their share values. Today things look remarkably similar, shares like Google, Apple and even the more moribund IBM are at historic highs. While these companies have working financial models that churn out cash (and there are other IT companies like them) a lot of tech stocks are riding their coat tails with insubstantial and unsustainable business models. In our opinion the Emperor and his lack of clothing will be noticed in the not too distant future, this will spell the end for a lot of tech companies. We’re not suggesting that Facebook will fail, but we are suggesting that its current valuation is absolutely ridiculous and that, either sooner or later, its valuation will re-adjust. That could happen right after the hype of the initial IPO, or it may not happen for a year or two, but it will happen. As an investor you don’t want to get caught in the cross-fire when it does happen so our suggestion is to steer clear of the Facebook IPO completely. The money to be made at Facebook will be made by the initial investors (Bono’s venture capital firm, Elevation Partners, among them) who got involved early enough to see their investments soar in value.

If you want some other reasons why investing in Facebook may not be such a good idea then you should read Louis Basenese’s post on the Wall Street Journal site where he says:

“Almost without exception, social media IPOs have proven to be a sucker’s bet. To date, none of the hype has translated into any profits for everyday investors. And I don’t expect that track record to improve any time soon.”

“Bottom line: The fundamentals that shot social media companies to instant stardom are already fading. That doesn’t bode well for future share prices. And when the history books are written, I’m convinced the only ones who will have profited from all the hype are going to be the investment bankers, not everyday investors like you and me.”

I would have to say I agree wholeheartedly with his reading of this upcoming IPO.

Camcorder to DVD Copying Service

Jan 032012

Camcorder to DVD Copying Service

Camcorder Video Tapes (often referred to as VHS-C or SVHS-C) use magnetic tape over which a magnetic sensor is physically run to store your information. Due to this mechanical reading mechanism and the makeup of the tape used, these cassettes degrade over time – even if they’re not being used. Video tapes were only ever intended to hold information for about 10 years and, in many cases, they begin to degrade even before this depending on how they are stored.

Don’t run the risk of losing your valuable video footage, convert your analogue Camcorder Video Tapes to Digital format. The most convenient format for most people is conversion to DVD, as the resultant disks can then be played in standard DVD players or on your PC.

If you don’t want to run the risk of losing your valuable videos of weddings, holidays, birthdays, festive celebrations, close relatives and other personal milestones then act now, contact us on 086 83 89 877 or email video@DZyne.net and we’ll arrange to have all your valuable memories transferred into a more long term and safer format.

Professional Hardware Copies

We use a professional direct hardware to hardware recording method which guarantees the best results. Your videos will obviously never be better quality than the original video, but we can create as faithful a copy as possible to the original, ensuring there is no loss of quality in the transfer. This is something which cannot be achieved using software based techniques through PC copying of your videos. As well as being complicated and frustrating, such methods invariably involve a loss of quality, sometimes quite severe, from the original video.

VHS or VHS-C Copies

We can accommodate copying Standard Video Format (VHS – large cassettes with two spindles) or Camcorder (VHS-C and SVHS-C with just a single spindle) tapes to DVD and digital formats. We cannot at the moment copy Hi8 (Sony HandyCam) or MiniDV (digital mini-tape format), unless you can supply the camera on which the video was recorded – in which case we can record it direct from the camera. We hope to have in-house equipment to facilitate these formats in the near future.

We can also arrange to have your videos transferred to video formats playable directly on a PC without a DVD (such as AVI, MPEG or DivX) so that you can store your precious videos on your PC, laptop, tablet computer or phone and play them from there or forward them to others whenever you wish.

Editing Digital Videos

Once your videos have been converted into digital format, whether on DVD or in a computer accessible format, you can then edit the videos in any way you wish, without fear of degradation of the footage. Once you store it in digital format it can be copied infinitely with no loss of quality whatsoever.

Confidentiality and Discretion Assured

As these videos obviously contain footage of a personal nature you will want to be assured that your information will be kept completely confidential and never passed on to third parties of any description. We can guarantee that our only aim is to make sure that you get returned to you the only copy of your information in a digital format so that your memories are protected. If you wish to have a document signed to this effect then we have no problem with such a request.

We copy a lot of these each week so we don’t actually view any video in full apart from checking that the video runs properly and copies right to the end.

Legal Issues

Bearing the aforementioned point in mind we will refuse to copy videos that are illegal in any way such as those containing copyright material or videos documenting illegal activity of any description. This service is perfectly legal and above board – we’d like to keep it that way. Apart from this we will transfer any personal videos which you have the right to copy.

Prices

Prices start from just €20 for the first video and €10 per video thereafter if there is more than one. Extra copies of the DVD’s can be provided for €5 each. We also offer a collect and deliver service which is available for free in the South Tipperary, North Cork, West Waterford and East Limerick areas. If you are from other areas of the country please just drop us a line and we can give you an idea of the cost involved. We can also arrange for postal collection and delivery if you wish.

For further information contact us at 086 83 89 877 or email video@DZyne.net.

Click here for some important information on transferring Videos to DVD or Digital Format.

We offer a similar service for standard VHS cassettes – see this post.

Video

Jan 032012

Video to DVD Conversion

Videos (which use magnetic tape over which a magnetic sensor is physically run to store your information) degrade over time. Video tapes were only ever intended to hold information for about 10 years and, in many cases, they begin to degrade even before this depending on how they are stored.

Backup your Important Videos

Don’t run the risk of losing your valuable video footage, convert your analogue Video Tapes to Digital format. The most convenient format for most people is conversion to DVD, as the resultant disks can then be played in standard DVD players or on your PC.

Professional Hardware Copies

We use a professional direct hardware to hardware recording method which guarantees the best results. Your videos will obviously never be better quality than the original video, but we can create as faithful a copy as possible to the original, ensuring there is no loss of quality in the transfer. This is something which cannot be achieved using software based techniques through PC copying of your videos. As well as being complicated and frustrating, such methods invariably involve a loss of quality, sometimes quite severe, from the original video.

VHS or VHS-C Copies

We can accommodate copying Standard Video Format (VHS – large cassettes) or Camcorder (VHS-S and VHS-C) tapes to DVD and digital formats. We cannot at the moment copy Hi8 (Sony HandyCam) or MiniDV (digital mini-tape format), unless you can supply the camera on which the video was recorded – in which case we can record it direct from the camera. We hope to have in-house equipment to facilitate these formats in the near future.

We can also arrange to have your videos transferred to video formats playable directly on a PC without a DVD (such as AVI, MPEG or DivX) so that you can store your precious videos on your PC, laptop, tablet computer or phone and play them from there or forward them to others whenever you wish.

Editing Digital Videos

Confidentiality and Discretion Assured

We copy a lot of these each week so we don’t actually view any video in full apart from checking that the video runs properly and copies right to the end.

Legal Issues

Bearing the aforementioned point in mind we will refuse to copy videos that are illegal in anyway such as those containing copyright material or videos documenting illegal activity of any description. This service is perfectly legal and above board – we’d like to keep it that way. Apart from this we will transfer any personal videos which you have the right to copy.

Prices

For further information contact us at 086 83 89 877 or email video@DZyne.net.

Click here for some important information on transferring Videos to DVD or Digital Format.

We offer a similar service for Camcorder (VHS-C) Tapes – See This Post.

Protect Your Data - or Pay a Legal Cost

Dec 132011

Protect Your Data – or Pay a Legal Cost

Yes, you read the post correctly. If you are a business professional of any kind you may think that keeping backups of your data is sufficient to protect you – but it’s not.

If you have sensitive information of any type belonging to your clients – or even information that could be matched with other information to become valuable to someone for a nefarious reason, then you must protect that data. Failure to do so could lead to legal consequences.

Unfortunately, in the current interconnected world it is becoming extremely easy to access data, even without physically having to be anywhere near the computer or systems holding the information.

For that reason you should not alone backup all your data, you should really encrypt any information you have so that others can’t access it for reasons other than that for which it was intended. Information held on password protected PC’s is not secure, such general password protection from your operating system (for most people some version of Windows) is notoriously unreliable and easy to circumvent by brute force methods or taking the disks out of the machines in which they are held. You need proper encryption software installed on your systems in order to secure the information on them.

If you have concerns about the data you are storing and how you should protect it then please feel free to call us in full confidentiality. We will be happy to offer you a free consultation and on-site evaluation.

Circumventing Irish National School Internet Restrictions

Nov 102011

Circumventing Irish National School Internet Restrictions

It is bureaucracy at its very zenith. I’m talking about the internet service that has been provided to Irish national schools. All Irish National Schools were provided with internet access, no matter where they were situated, just a few short years ago. This, you would think, was a very good thing. And indeed it was – but in a very limited capacity.

In typical bureaucratic fashion Irish Schools were provided with full internet access – and the the system was given a Net Nanny type system, blocking all ‘unsuitable’ content.

That is perfectly understandable, you would have thought, you really don’t want some of the muck that is available on the internet freely available to your kids while they are at school. Being as inquisitive as they are you can be sure they’ll find nooks and crannies to visit that, quite apart from being places you’d rather they didn’t visit, they have the potential to harm school equipment as well.

The big problem? Well, the software blocks pretty well everything that a teacher would find useful in the course of their teaching duties. In particular, there’s no access to video streaming websites such as YouTube, which contain a huge array of video material that teachers would find useful – but they can’t access any of it.

Consequently internet access in Irish schools remains pretty much as it was before blanket provision was made – utterly useless. In fact, for schools that had adequate internet access before the introduction of a unified system by the Department of Education, their internet access has become a whole lot worse.

Instead of a graded system, whereby teachers could, for the benefit of pupils, bypass the blocking software, there is a ‘one size fits all’ approach – everything useful is blocked essentially.

The good news – the blocking of video download sites can be circumvented – but be aware that you may be in somewhat of a technical grey area. What you have to do is download the video to a school laptop outside of the school. I’m aware that it is a bit of a retrograde step, but in the face of Big Brother type bureaucracy you’ve not got much choice at the moment.

If there is content on the internet (YouTube particularly) that you wish to access for the purposes of education at school here’s what you have to do.

Bring the school laptop home with you – permitted by most schools.

Visit the ATube Catcher Download page. Download the software and install. During the install process, use the custom install option, do not allow it to install Ask Toolbar or Ask as your search provider unless you really want to do so (toolbars in general are not the safest things to install from a spyware point of view). Don’t allow it to install the Registry Scanner it will offer either. It uses these offers to keep the software free, but you don’t need any of them.

This software will allow you to record any YouTube stream, saving it as a video file on your PC. When you return to school you can then play this file using Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, or some other video playback software.

Once you have ATube Catcher installed you can then open YouTube and do a search to find the video you require. Set this video to play and once it has started click on pause – you don’t need to play the video at all for ATube Catcher to download it, all it needs is the address of the video.

Take the video URL (that is the address of the video in the top bar visible above your Internet Browser – Internet Explorer, Firefox. Opera, Chrome, Safari, etc.). Select the URL and copy it using the keys Ctrl + c. Go back to ATube Catcher and paste this URL in the space provided for it using Ctrl + v. Then choose the output format you want – AVI Standard is fine for most people, or you can choose MP3 High Fidelity if you want to record just the soundtrack or a song. Then click the blue Download button.

This will then save to the Video file in your My Documents folder (you can change this to another folder using the Browse button if you wish.)

When you return to school you’ll be able to play the video by clicking on the video file created by ATube Catcher.

Note: This process is entirely different to just dragging a YouTube link to a USB Key or other storage device. All you are putting on the device in this case is a ‘link’ to the YouTube video, which then just goes back to YouTube to open it on the internet again, which of course you can’t do at school, so it fails. You have to save a copy of the video on to your drive using a program such as ATube Catcher for the process to work properly.

Why, you may well ask, does YouTube not allow you to download video? Advertising is the answer. YouTube is owned by Google. It uses the videos on its system as carriers for Google adverts. Once you save the video to your hard drive the Google Ads don’t work anymore so Google makes nothing out of them. Like many other things in life, it’s all down to money.

The legality or otherwise of this process is somewhat of a grey area. Google will tell you that the downloading is illegal (quite apart from the copyright issues that may be involved depending on where the content came from first day – not an issue I intend to deal with here). Videos put on YouTube are the property of those who uploaded them, not the property of Google or YouTube – YouTube is merely the carrier. When people put them on a public forum such as YouTube they are giving everybody free access to them, so you’re perfectly entitled to download and use them for your own purposes. Google will tell you otherwise because it wants everyone to use YouTube as its forum for streaming the content and click on its ads. It has never officially been legally challenged on this in a court anywhere to the best of my knowledge and with Google’s deep pockets it is likely to remain that way for some time – but as with everything else, everybody is happily downloading the content using products such as ATube Catcher anyway, despite Google’s best efforts to corral everybody into its advertising walled garden.

You’ll find the official Google stance on the issue in item 4C at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/static?gl=US&template=terms. It’s a real ‘it’s our ball and we’ll play whatever game we want with it’ statement.

After that feel free to make up your own mind on the issue, but don’t say that you haven’t been warned.

Greybytes Computer Maintenance & Support Scam

Oct 292011

Greybytes Computer Maintenance & Support Scam

This particular company has been very active in the Irish market in recent times. We’ve had complaints from numerous clients over the past few weeks that they’ve received unsolicited ‘cold calls’ from a company called Greybytes. The call is, as is usual with these Computer Maintenance or Technical Support Scams (click on the link, we’ve featured these scams before on the site), from an Indian or Pakistani caller. It will typically start by them telling you that they have found ‘virus or malware activity’ either ‘on their servers’ or ‘following a scan through their network’.

What throws a lot of people is that the callers often know your surname, simply because they’ve got your phone number from the Golden Pages webiste. This introduces an element of believability to the call and imparts a level of trust that these scams need in order to convince the defrauded party to part with information such as their credit card details.

This Greybytes one (www.greybytes.net) is a particularly nasty piece of work because the website, at first glance, looks perfectly believable. If you look through it in more detail you’ll find that the English included is not written by a native English speaker. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this, but it often indicates sites that have not got the best intentions of the ‘client’ at heart. This site is no different. The company will also guide you through payment via their website payment system, which looks vaguely legitimate and will even give you an invoice and Technical Support contact number. This is a most unusual step for such fraudulent companies, and a message that they are making enough money to allow them to blur the boundaries between a legitimate and fraudulent company.

Greybytes intentions, no matter what else they may tell you, is simply to defraud you of your money either directly by signing up for their service (not even a cheap service, it’s quite expensive, even if you were to receive the offered technical support – see here) or via access to your machine once you’ve visited the site address they give you.

The company uses perfectly legal and legitimate software such as LogMeIn (via its www.logmein123 – LogMeIn Rescue website) or Ammyy (www.ammyy.com/en/) to get you to allow them to have remote access to your PC. At this stage they can take pretty much anything they like from your macine – Visa Card details (if they haven’t got them from you already), bank details, logins, etc. Although the company will tell you that it is based in Ireland, it is not (even though it sports an Irish flag on its web page). It is, in fact, registered to an Indian national in Kolkata called Devjoy Mitra (see here).

To add insult to injury, if you purchase their services the company will give you a ‘Technical Help Phone Number’ which is a tolled number, so you’ll pay them even more money. It varies from case to case, but this one is often used - 01865589088.

It has caused untold problems in New Zealand and Australia already, if you do an internet search for the company you’ll find a number of threads dedicated to the scam operation. If you have been scammed by this company please contact us as you will need to have the software they installed removed and, if they have charged your Visa card or Master Card you will need to write to your Credit Card company to ask to have the transaction reversed. You should also contact the Gardaí Bureau of Fraud Investigation (GBFI) at Harcourt Street (you can email them on checks@iol.ie) to inform them of the unsolicited call and fraudulent transactions.

As a general rule it is wise to remember that no legitimate company will ever make an unsolicited cold call to you about computer maintenance, so if you get one just hang up on them, you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble.

What catches most people is that they claim they can see ‘virus activity’ from your machine on their servers. Remember that they cannot see your computer at all, they tell everybody this, to get you to give them access to your machine.

If you think you may have a problem with your PC, shut it down and give a local computer repair technician a call immediately, do not allow these scam operators to make money and continue their fraudulent activity at your expense.

Convert Videos to DVD or Digital Video

Oct 202011

Convert Videos to DVD or Digital Video

Convert all your important videos to DVD or digital format. Weddings, big sports events, important milestones in your life, kids birthdays and numerous cherished memories. All these are stored in videos all over your house and, if you want to keep those memories, they probably couldn’t be in a worse place. Videos just aren’t very reliable. Quite apart from the fact that video recorders will soon be a thing of the past, so playing them after your current one breaks down could be very difficult.

The picture with this post says it all, videos have a pretty short shelf-life if you want to keep anything on them for any reasonable period of time. They also deteriorate quite a bit over time and, if you watch them a lot, they run a huge risk of damaged or even broken tape, which is finicky to fix and normally not very satisfactory when it is fixed, even professionally.

The ideal solution is to have the videos transferred on to a DVD or converted to Digital format so you can watch them on your DVD player on on your PC, iPad or even mobile phone. You can still keep and use the video if you wish, safe in the knowledge that you have a backup.

Here at DZyne.net we can facilitate this transfer for you quickly and easily and it doesn’t cost the earth. In fact, when you consider the value of the memories you are protecting it is, indeed, very reasonable.

If you are in the South Tipperary area you can just drop your Videos into use here at the office, or we can collect them from you if you would prefer. If you are more distant then you can post the Videos to us and we’ll post them and the copies right back to you.

Prices

Prices start from just €20 for the first video and €10 per video thereafter if there is more than one. Extra copies of the DVD’s can be provided for €5 each.

For further information contact us at 086 83 89 877 or email info@DZyne.net.

Click here for some important information on transferring Videos to DVD or Digital Format.

Steve Jobs is Dead

Oct 062011

Steve Jobs – Innovator & Creator – Dies Aged 56

We knew it was coming, but it still came as a shock this morning to learn that Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple Computers and up there among the most innovative human beings this planet has ever seen, had passed away following a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

Here at DZyne.net we would just like to add our condolences to the many thousands pouring in to his family. The world has lost a visionary, someone who could see what the world would want and then had the ability to create it.

There are a number of fitting tributes to the man around the web this morning:

New iPhone Launch on October 4th

Sep 282011

‘Let’s Talk iPhone’ Invite Indicates New iPhone Launch on October 4th

Well, it’s as official as it gets with Apple. An invitation sent out yesterday to news and media outlets to attend at the Cuppertino firm’s headquarters for a ‘Let’s talk iPhone’ event is as clear an indication as Apple will ever give that it is about to launch it’s long awaited (in technology terms, it’s only been a few months really) follow up to the ubiquitous iPhone 4.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) Apple is remarkably good at hiding the details of the projects on which it is working and muddying the water to ensure that the ‘rumour mill’ indicates that it is doing many things that it is not doing at all.

We can’t even be completely certain that it will release a new iPhone on Tuesday next, although it is incredibly likely as it is not like the Californian IT giant to miss a pre-Christmas opportunity to ship gazillions of its newest products before the festive onslaught.

Apart from the widely rumoured changes to the design of the new iPhone, one of the most strongly backed rumours is that the new phone will come with a considerably upgraded Voice Control system and a new 8Mp camera.

We wait with bated breath as they say.

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